The terminal program

bin/trading-agent with no subcommand opens a full-screen chat with the desks, modelled on Claude Code's terminal interface. It can do everything the web page does: talk to any desk, answer its questions and permission requests, send and receive pictures and documents, watch the side panel's cards, and open every page, from Trading with its kill switch to Schedule and Files. The only web feature it lacks is voice input, because that uses Chrome's speech recognition, which a terminal does not have.

It is a client of the running gateway, exactly as the web page is: it sends requests to the same routes with the access token, and it receives the same live events over one connection. The gateway, the desks and the risk engine do not know or care which of the two you use, and you can use both at once.

Orange dots are requests from the terminal, each carrying the token: today's journal read once when a desk's chat opens, a message, and an answer to a desk's request. Blue dots are the live events coming back over the one connection.

Starting it

The gateway must be running, as the service normally keeps it. Then, from any folder:

bin/trading-agent                  # opens on the desk you used last, or general
bin/trading-agent --desk scalper   # opens on the scalper desk

The token is read from TRADING_AGENT_GATEWAY_ACCESS_TOKEN in .env, so there is nothing to paste. Your earlier prompts, the theme, the last desk and which side panel cards you folded are kept in ~/.local/state/trading-agent/. Leaving the program with /exit, or Ctrl+C twice, leaves the desks running.

Starting the gateway itself now needs its subcommand, bin/trading-agent serve, which is what the service and every page of these docs already use.

The screen

The screen below shows a desk's permission request waiting in the dock, with the side panel open on the right.

The table below names the parts from top to bottom.

Part	What it shows
Status line	The live connection, the desk and its state, DRY RUN or LIVE ORDERS, and the model the desk tries first
Chat	Today's turns: your messages, tool calls folded into one line such as "Ran a command, looked at a picture", pictures, the desk's answers drawn as Markdown with tables, and the turn's status
Side panel	The web page's eight cards: desk, model, context window, funds, profit and loss, orders and trades, tools, outputs; Ctrl+B shows or hides it
Progress line	While the desk works: what it is doing, such as "Running a command… sleep 25", and the time so far
Request dock	A question, plan or permission request from the desk, waiting for your answer
File tray	Files waiting to go with your next message, with their upload state
Message box	Where you write; Enter sends
Key hints	The main keys

Keys

The keys follow Claude Code wherever the meaning carries over. The table below lists them; ? in the empty message box shows the same list.

Key	What it does
Enter	Send the message, or pick the highlighted entry of the command menu
Shift+Enter, Ctrl+J	Start a new line; Alt+Enter, or a backslash just before Enter, also work
Up, Down	Earlier prompts, from the first or last line of the box
Ctrl+R	Search earlier prompts
/	The command menu, narrowing as you type; Tab or Enter picks
@	Complete a file path; the file goes with the message
Ctrl+V	Attach the picture on the clipboard; text pastes as usual
Esc	Stop the running turn; twice clears the message box
Ctrl+C	Clear the box, or stop the running turn; twice to leave
Ctrl+D	Leave, when the box is empty (press twice)
Tab	Answer the request in the dock; Esc goes back to the message box
Alt+D	Switch desk
Alt+P	Choose the model the desk tries first
Ctrl+O	Open or fold every tool call
Ctrl+B	Show or hide the side panel
F2	Go to a page
Ctrl+P	The command palette: every page and action, by name
Ctrl+T	Switch between the dark and the light theme

Shift+Enter needs a terminal that reports it, such as Kitty, WezTerm, Ghostty or a VS Code terminal with its keyboard protocol on; Ctrl+J works everywhere.

Commands

A message that starts with a slash is a command. A few belong to the terminal program itself; every other command goes to the desk, which answers it exactly as it does on the web page and Telegram, so /status, /context, /btw, /think high and the rest work unchanged. Talking to a desk lists the desk's commands, and the menu that opens when you type / lists both kinds with what each does, including the desk's skills.

Terminal command	What it does
/attach PATH	Attach a file to the next message
/desk [NAME]	Switch desk; without a name, a list opens
/model	Choose the model; /model NAME with a name goes to the desk instead
/theme	Switch between the dark and the light theme
/keys	The list of keys
/exit, /quit	Leave the program; the desks keep running
/desks, /trading, …	Open a page, as the next section describes

Pages

The web page's pages are screens of their own. Each opens with its command, from the F2 list below, or by name from the Ctrl+P palette, and Esc goes back to the chat. Each screen's footer lists its keys.

Command	Page	Keys besides Esc and r (refresh)
/desks	Every desk's state, profit and models	Enter chats with it, p pauses or resumes, f flattens after asking for a reason
/activity	Today's events from every desk, newest first, live	d filters by desk, o shows routine events, / searches
/trading	Desks' profit and stocks, halts, positions, open orders, UBI's order book	l loads the order book, k switches between orders, trades and open parents, K fires the kill switch
/sessions	A desk's sessions and exchanges, memory search, summaries and notes	d next desk, / searches
/files	Your files in an editor, and the desks' proposals as coloured diffs	Ctrl+S saves, Ctrl+U puts back the saved text, a accepts, x rejects, h shows decided proposals
/checkpoints	Snapshots of a desk's own files	s restores the highlighted one after asking for a reason
/schedule	A desk's jobs with their next runs, the latest runs, price alerts	n new job, g runs one now, Delete removes a job or alert
/skills	A desk's usable skills with their use, and the hidden ones	d next desk
/extensions	Subagents, MCP servers and packages
/models	Each desk's model order, today's usage and costs, Claude's limits
/channels	Telegram's state, codes waiting to be paired, paired chats	a approves, Delete revokes
/settings	Standing permissions, and the configuration with secrets masked	Delete revokes a permission
/apps	The packages' web apps and their units	s starts, t stops, e restarts, o opens it in the browser

The kill switch asks, as on the web page, for a reason and the typed word FLATTEN, and it does nothing until both are given. Flatten and checkpoint restore ask for a reason.

/skills is also a desk command that lists the skills as text. In the terminal the page takes it, because the page shows the same skills with their use and the hidden ones too.

Questions, plans and permissions

A desk's questions, plans and permission requests wait in the dock above the message box, one at a time, permission requests first because they lapse. The cards work as on the web page: number keys or Enter choose, a question card has tabs when the desk asks several questions, a plan card approves or sends the plan back with feedback, and a permission card counts down to its lapse and offers Yes, Yes and don't ask again, and No with a reason.

The dock never takes the keyboard by itself. A desk keeps working while it waits, so a request can arrive while you are typing; if the dock took the keyboard, your Enter could answer it, and on a permission card the highlighted choice is Yes. Press Tab to go to the card and Esc to come back. Inside a permission or plan card, Tab and any letter you type go to its text box, so a reason you are typing can never turn into a Yes.

Answers given here are recorded as given "via terminal", which is what the transcript, the web page and Telegram then show.

Pictures and documents

A file goes with your message in any of four ways: type @ and a path, which the menu completes; /attach PATH; drag the file onto the terminal window, which pastes its path; or Ctrl+V for a picture on the clipboard. Files upload at once and wait in the tray above the message box; Backspace in the empty box removes the newest. The kinds and the 20 MB limit are the same as on the web page, described in Pictures and documents.

Pictures you attached, pictures a tool showed the desk and pictures the desk sends are drawn in the chat. A picture under a tool run stays visible while the run is folded. Enter or a click on a picture, or on a document the desk sent, opens it with your desktop's own program.

How sharp a picture looks depends on the terminal, as the table below shows.

Terminal	How pictures are drawn
Kitty, WezTerm, Ghostty	Full pictures, with the Kitty graphics protocol
foot, mlterm, xterm with Sixel, VS Code with terminal.integrated.enableImages on	Full pictures, with Sixel
Any other	Coloured half-block characters, enough to see what a chart shows; Enter opens the real picture

Ctrl+V reads the clipboard with wl-paste on Wayland or xclip on X11. On a Wayland desktop without wl-paste, xclip still reads pictures copied from most programs; installing the wl-clipboard package covers the rest.

One message from a script

-p sends one message or command, prints the reply and exits, as claude -p does. Text piped on standard input goes before the message, and --output-format chooses how the reply is printed.

bin/trading-agent -p /status
bin/trading-agent -p "What is NIFTY doing?" --desk intraday
bin/trading-agent -p /context --output-format json
cat notes.txt | bin/trading-agent -p "Summarise these notes"

Format	What it prints
text	The reply as it streams in, with one line per tool call; the default
json	One object at the end, with the answer, the backend, the tool calls and any requests the desk raised
stream-json	Every event of the turn as one line of JSON, then the same final object

This is the real output of bin/trading-agent -p /status against a gateway on 18 October 2026:

Desk: general
Mode: dry_run
State: idle, paused: no, triggers waiting: 0
Session: 2026-10-18-2, 0 exchange(s) so far
Models, in the order they will be tried:
1. claude: ready
2. deepseek: ready
3. qwen: ready
4. gemma: ready

When the desk is busy, the message is handed to the running turn, as every message is, and -p follows that turn to its answer. A second -p sent twelve seconds into a turn that was running sleep 25 printed this, and its answer is the running turn's answer:

  [The desk is busy, so your message goes to the running turn at its next tool call.]
  [Your message reached the running turn.]
The command finished and printed `Sun Oct 18 10:49:03 IST 2026`. BANANA
  [model] answered by claude

Questions and permission requests the desk raises meanwhile are printed with their request id, to be answered in the terminal program or on the web page, because a one-shot command cannot wait for a person. send is the same as -p with the text format.

When something is wrong

What you see	What to do
"The gateway at http://127.0.0.1:8120 does not answer"	Start it: systemctl --user start trading-agent, or bin/trading-agent serve by hand
The program ends with "The gateway refused the access token"	Check TRADING_AGENT_GATEWAY_ACCESS_TOKEN in .env; the gateway reads it when it starts, so restart the service after changing it
The status line says Reconnecting…	The gateway restarted or stopped; the chat reloads by itself once it is back
Shift+Enter sends instead of starting a line	The terminal does not report Shift+Enter; use Ctrl+J
Pictures look blocky	The terminal has no picture protocol; Enter on a picture opens it in your image viewer